Optical imaging at diffraction-limited resolution in whole living organisms, where cell-cell interactions play crucial roles, is difficult due to refractive index heterogeneities arising from different cell morphologies within tissues and sub-cellular domains within cells. While adaptive optics (“AO”) using a variety of approaches has been applied to this problem, AO microscopy is difficult to use in many specimens because of modal complexity and the large amplitude of the wavefront aberrations that are encountered, as well as how quickly these aberrations change as a function of position within the specimen.